﻿Someone Tried To Impersonate Me [0:00:00]
So, I knew something was up when I started receiving all of these emails asking me,
“Antonio, when are you going to put up our product review? When are you going
to talk about the suit that we sent you?” Now, being a style YouTuber and not the most
organized one, you may say, “Antonio, that sounds like an email that you probably receive, right?”
But, here is the deal, I’ve never heard of these people. I’ve never received an email from them.
I didn’t even know about their companies and I definitely hadn’t received any of their products.
Now, to be honest, mistakes happen and we are really busy here at Real Men Real Style. I get
a lot of correspondence, hundreds of emails every single week and we try to get back to everybody.
We get hundreds of messages on different social media platforms. I get about almost
a dozen letters every single week and we like to respond back to people. So, you know,
something could have come in, different packages could have gotten slipped hidden in the office.
I went through looked around. We went through all of our correspondence and we could find
nothing related to what multiple people now were telling me,
“Hey, you need to do this review. You’ve received this suit.” And I’m like, “Nope, I haven’t.”
Now, it took a while, I know I’m a bit slow, but eventually I caught on.
Somebody was using my identity. Somebody was out there saying they are Antonio Centeno
and to send them free products for reviews. Somebody was out there stealing my reputation,
stealing my identity to get free products. Now, I’m no stranger to someone using my
likeness to stealing my identity online, using me to actually push their products. In fact, there
was this great video I found had it sent to me by a fan over in India. They just cracked me up.
Apparently, I’m over there pushing some type of sex herbal enhancement product. Yeah,
who knew I had it, you know, all these potential in this industry.
Now, some of you guys may be saying, “Well, that looks authentic to me.” And I appreciate the
compliment, but I do not speak Tamil. And to be honest, I don’t need those enhancing products.
So, in today’s video, gents, I’m going to share with you the story about how
somebody impersonated me, stole thousands of dollars from unsuspecting individuals,
and what it did to my reputation. I’m going to talk about first
the letters I received and what people are writing me. Next, I’m going to talk about why I didn’t
take action when I should have, how I missed the bus, how I didn’t see a lot of the signs.
And finally, this is the most interesting part is – so, whenever somebody steals your identity, this
is like one of those faceless crimes. You never meet them you never hear about this person.
Well, in this case, I did find out who did this. And, yeah, guys, I explained it, you got to stick
around for the end, but this video is going to be awesome, guys. Are you ready for it?
Let’s do this. [Music]
Now, before we get started, quick question. Do you know what the fastest growing crime in America is?
And how bad is this? Every fourteen seconds, there’s a new victim. The answer, identity
theft. And when it happens, it happens fast. First you may notice, hey, I can’t log into
my email, I’m locked out. Next thing you know, get a notification from your bank,
from your credit card companies, password continue. What is going on? You can’t get
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The first letter I received was back in March of 2019 from Oliver Wicks. And they were writing me
saying, “Antonio, we haven’t heard anything from you. You had reached out to us about receiving a
suit. We had sent you some free clothing. Can you let us know the status on the review?”
And we ended up going back and forth. And this is what they said. They said,
“We received this email from you. It said, ‘Hi, Oliver Wicks staff. My name is Antonio Centeno,
social media influencer and founder of the YouTube channel vlog, Real Men Real Style.
I’m in the process of creating a new video for my YouTube channel titled, the best made-to-measure
services of 2019. And I plan to include a review of Oliver Wicks made-to-measure program. I would
love to work with you and could you all send me a suit. Here are my measurements attached. I think
it would be a great opportunity and showcase.” [0:05:15]
Now, to be honest, gents, I don’t even remember receiving this email. My assistant, Jamie,
does a really good job of keeping most emails out of my sight. She actually sends me a summary. But,
if she can handle it, she takes care of it. And she told me at the time, she thought that, hey,
these guys had just been maybe swindled. She had noted, hey, this is not our email,
antoniocentenormrs@gmail.com. And she went back and forth with them and said, hey, you know,
we’re sorry, but I don’t think this is us. And she did confirm with me I think just in
the meeting and we kind of moved on like, okay, you know, it was a one-off, somebody is trying
to take advantage of these people. I hope that people would just be a little bit more careful
when they’re striking a deal with somebody. But, I didn’t give it too much thought.
Late that year, I had another company, Sartorial reached out and say, hey,
we’ve been having correspondents, again, with this antoniocentenormrs@gmail.com and they started
getting a little bit fishy. I think they did send him not full-on suit, but they sent him some ties,
maybe some other accessories, a few shirts. But, they weren’t getting good correspondence.
The email stopped working for them. And they were trying to figure out,
hey, what’s going on with the reviews? Are we going to be able to make this happen?
Is this actually legitimately you? And this is when all of a sudden,
the red flag started popping up like, hey, like this, again, this person,
whoever is doing this is doing it. We responded back, it was a very similar email. Apparently,
the guy was using a foreign email basically saying, you know, who I am and I’m guessing he
mass emailed just tons of people out there. So, again, this was the second time this popped up
in a year. And, yeah, we both – you know, I didn’t know what to do about it because here is somebody
is stealing out and sending out and impersonating me, but I don’t know how to shut this guy down.
A few months later, I received another email. This one coming from IsuiT and we have a gentleman over
there just saying, “Antonio, a while back we had sent you this suit you were going to do
the video. We’re very much looking forward to it, but it’s been over six months since we have sent
the suit out and we haven’t heard anything back. Can you please let us know what is going on?”
And at this point, I just felt really bad. I went on to check the guy’s website. I understand this
is a business, they’re trying to make things happen. And we had to write them back and say,
“Hey, can you please send us.” Apparently, somebody named Brandon
say they are the RMRS content director and they had reached out, they had asked some – for some
garments for a video sponsorship for your channel. He talked about views, insights, and conversation
rate and convinced us to join. I mean, the guy really sold them on the whole thing.
We agreed because we really liked your website and the concept behind it, so we
send him a complete made luxury outfit. I think it was not the first time because we found out
there apparently are other victims. So, here in the tailoring community or
in the suiting community, people are, you know, finding out that Real Men Real Style apparently
is taking suits and not making videos. I wish it would have stop there, but it
didn’t. I started getting letters from people, business owners that legitimately are asking,
“Antonio, what’s going on? You’re not answering the phone, the number that you
apparently gave us. Your email doesn’t work.” These were, you know, no one said anything really
hateful, but they’re like, hey, like we had a business arrangement that was expensive for
my shop to make the suit. It sound like a lot of smaller tailors or smaller suiting shops,
who I’m not going to name apparently had made suits had made some of them even sent some shoes
to this guy apparently, you know, with the idea that they were going to get reviews on my channel,
that they were going to have me talk about them in our videos, put out something on our website
basically help create and grow their business. And I had to send out just apologies. I got
people’s phone numbers, I was trying to call people. I don’t know, you know, but I’m like,
what can I do? Warning the entire world that somebody out there is impersonating me and using,
you know, our basically, you know, just basically saying they’re us and stealing from people.
Now, I’d like to say that we took action fast and we took action swift and that we were able
to help people out and make everything good. The reality is I couldn’t. I couldn’t just be doing
free reviews. They’re under that being about six different people different
companies that apparently were scammed. And these are the ones I know about. I know
that there are many who just kind of like, oh, you know, that Antonio guy is a scammer.
That Antonio guy doesn’t respond, I – they moved on. So, I’m assuming they’re probably
close to twenty, you know, if I were to do the math on just people that don’t bother with,
because I know that’s how I am in business. I don’t have time to go after things that
have dropped. It’s just not -- I’m always running forward. Point being is I realized that we have an
issue because we have this public presence because we’re putting out information because there’s
power, there’s basically resources that you can get from people.
I looked around on Instagram, we had tons of fake accounts, people that were saying they were me.
And one of them I remember, he was putting out stuff that total red pill, which I’m, you know,
a pretty conservative guy. [0:10:01]
But, I would not be saying what he was saying about how women,
you know, should basically be, you know, in the kitchen with, you know, making babies,
barefoot, and what? Pregnant, barefoot, and with a sandwich. I mean, he posted something that’s
like I – and my – my face is on this thing. There’s TikTok accounts that people are just
taking in information and putting this out there. There are Pinterest boards, I realized I mean,
there were Twitter accounts that were fake. So, I reached out and I tried to kill a lot of
this stuff and come to find out I apparently needed certain protections, legal protections,
copyright, you know, trademarks, so I had to then file that. That took six
months before I got that paperwork done. Then, I was able to go in and say, “No,
this is me.” So, it took us almost a year to start eradicating and I don’t know how much damage was
done there. But, the worst I think was knowing that somebody out there was stealing our like this
and was basically taking from people, stealing from hardworking individuals around the world.
Some of these were, you know, based over – one is in Bangkok, another one the company was in Hong
Kong, we had a company over in Europe, and there were a few American companies, again, that were
taken advantage of. And to this day, I’m sure some people have just it’s ruined my good name. And the
frustrating part is what could I do about it? Now, the part of the video that I hinted towards,
I actually found out I received a letter from the person that apparently
had stolen my identity was out there impersonating me. Now, this was one person and there could
have been other ones out there. I’m assuming that this is the only time this has happened.
But, I thought that it was really interesting to get a letter. But, before I read this letter and
I reveal what I sent back and what happened when I sent it back, I want to talk about,
you know, what actions could I take? You know, for me in the situation,
I did feel a bit helpless. I just kept moving forward. For me, I felt, you know what? I
got to just be who I can, I got to realize this is outside of my control. This is something that
I am going to be the best person I can be, I’m always going to treat people with respect.
We had a company-wide meeting. We made sure our correspondence was clean and pristine that we got
back to people within 24 hours whether someone has a basic style question, whether somebody,
you know, wants to do a deal with me, I always try to respond whether it’s on LinkedIn,
whether it’s on Instagram, if you’re DM-ing me on, you know, Facebook hidden profile,
I’m finding way to try to get back to you because I know that when people were sending
message, they just want to hear a response. And we would have probably done such a better job
if we had responded quickly, if we had seen these patterns. I talked to Jamie about just being, hey,
when you see something like this, don’t be afraid to let me know. Yes, it may upset me, but that’s
not your fault. We just work on having better communication within the company, so that we can
better spot when things like these are happening. But, that was what I try – I just try to
improve ourselves. I try to improve myself, the company, and the way that we are running things,
so that you – if anyone ever meets us in person, we can, you know, with all sincerity say, hey,
we did all we could, I’m sorry you were taken advantage of. But, you know, it was
just unfortunately something out of our control. So, who was this person? Well, he said his name
was Dominic. And he said this, “Dear Antonio. I’d like to apologize to you for my actions. Several
years ago, I began to pretend to be you in order to get free suits using a fake email address.
I was young and stupid and didn’t have any concerns for the consequences of my actions,
who I hurt in the process. Karma has certainly come back around for what I did.
Since then, I learned how difficult it is to achieve success and build your own brand
suffering many failures and setbacks of my own. Because of it, I lost my job. I lost my longtime
girlfriend. One day, I truly hope to be able to make things right to you
and to the companies I scammed. And look you in the eye and apologize for what I did.
I’m truly happy to see you succeeding everyday despite me trying to piggyback
off your good name and brand. I hope someday I can convince you to forgive me, Antonio.”
He signed it as [Dominic Cobb]. Now, I think that’s a make because I had
responded to this email and my response came right back. So, no one ever got to see
the video that I recorded for Dominic. And in that video, I want – I want to
share it with you, guys. I did not say, you know, a – I did not condemn him. I, you know,
the guy has already gone through enough pain, he’s already gone through enough hurt. There’s
nothing I’m going to get from piling on to it. I just wanted him to let him know I forgive him
and I wish him great success. Hopefully, this can become a life lesson, something that he can learn
from. And, yeah, I just want him to be able to forgive himself and to move on because it really
sounds like this guy, you know, has more than paid for whatever, you know, damage he did.
And I think we’ve all got things in our past, we’ve got things that – it’s one of those things,
I think men especially we are so hard on ourselves when we’re maybe not the best provider
or maybe don’t have success when others do. We’re not maybe the best athlete, we don’t
have the best physical body, we’re not the smartest person when we let people down. We
say we’re going to do something and we don’t do it and we beat ourselves up.
[0:15:00] You know, animals are interesting because
animals, they learned once. If you misjudge -- a cat misjudges jumping on something, it
falls and it feels the pain once. A dog goes and finally gets that tire and bites the tire once,
it’s going to learn very quickly there is nothing to have there and it’s going to be painful.
The point being is human beings never. When we make a mistake, we beat ourselves up again and
again and again and again. And one of the best things you can do is just simply try to make
amends, but then forgive yourself and move on. Your life is not defined by mistakes.
And, Dominic if you ever hear this video, if you ever watch this, know that, hey,
man, I forgive you and I want you to forgive yourself and move on and live a good life.
I know, I am not a perfect person, neither are you, neither is anyone watching this video.
And, yeah, so that’s it, guys. Hopefully you enjoyed this. I had a lot of fun
making this video. Let me know, again, in the comments if you are able to find, you know,
how many times you’re on the dark web. I really like today’s sponsor because
having your identity stolen – and my sister by the way, she actually had her identity stolen and it
was just a nightmare like six months later like she still had like letters coming in and she did
everything she could, but it was a mess. So, again, the sooner you can catch that,
if you can get alerts that your identity has been stolen, that is a great thing. So, guys,
again, go check out the sponsor down below. And what video to watch next? Well,
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on the video right here. [0:16:39] End of audio